Releasing App Updates

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The feature updates we've done,
over the past two years have defined our business.

We're doing updates at least once a month of all
of our products one question might be
so what's driving these updates?
I think it's a combination of creativity,
we have an extremely gifted chief product officer,
and design team, and then we have a really strong analytics
discipline as well, that's informing us
as to what's working and what isn't working.
We're building a deeper community and platform
and our users are staying around longer and longer and we wanted
to really focus on engagement and retention and part
of the subscription business model is you know the more the
user renews the better it is.
And how do you get users to stay around longer?
Build a better product.

Build better features, build more reasons for them
to come back to want to stick around.
For the big updates, it's Jeannie
in our product team thinking big, thinking what's going
to move the needle, and taking a risk.
For example, we just launched group video
in Sing! Karaoke a few weeks ago, and group video was just,
that's just something that we felt like we had to do.
We launched video last year, that was just solos and duets,
and for us singing is about singing with as many people,
that's the core of the app,
that's the social part of the app.

And to have video not have group was, it just wasn't right.
It ended up creating this new expressive experience
for our users, which is so crucial to our vision,
of creating a new social media and allowing people
to be expressive through music, together.
How we get the word out about a major feature update,
to our apps, when we talk to the community directly.
We talk to video users about the updates that are coming up,
we share with them what the features are.

The other thing is, the app icon, for a big app update,
or feature update, or even just seasonal,
we'll update the app icon.

Because even if it's just a little pop of something,
it tells the user there's something new.
What we saw when we launched with new app icons,
we saw a lot of, returning users launching the app.
We've gone deep.
We've invested in our network, we've invested
in the experience, and we've made really big bets,
such as video in our sing karaoke product.
We also make these smaller bets
that are more iterative in nature.
And if you were to characterize what's motivating those
iterative steps, it's an analytical process,
where we're trying to understand how do we create
better retention?
How do we create better engagement?
For example, one of the things we'll look at is,
is that first time funnel, through the product.
How many people do we lose at each step
of the funnel before we get them into that core mechanic
of singing a song into your phone?
That's where we want to get you.

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